DATELINE: CUBA : THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, THEN AND NOW

Las Coloradas Beach, 1956:

Eighty-two men, including Fidel Castro and Ernesto (Che) Guevara, landed in the Oriente Province on Dec. 2 after sailing from Mexico on the cabin cruiser Granma.

Havana, 1991:

Every night on CubaVision, they show a movie.

Cuban television has two working channels. One runs nothing but the Pan American Games, morning, noon and night, hosted seven days a week by a guy named Hector, morning, noon and night. Hector looks bushed.

The other channel usually shows cartoons, often ones about a little talking pineapple who is always getting into trouble. Maybe he is being chased by somebody who works for Dole.

Anyhow, the movies aren’t always interesting, but the Spanish subtitles are.

In “Vertigo,” an Alfred Hitchcock movie set in and around San Francisco, Jimmy Stewart mentions to Kim Novak something having to do with Berkeley. The subtitle translated Berkeley into “Brooklyn.”

Later, Kim tells Jimmy that she has got a job at Magnin’s. The subtitle reads: “Magnet’s.”

The next night’s feature was the Paul Newman boxing film, “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” about a punk named Rocky Barbella who is too stupid to do anything but fight and falls in love with a really shy girl. (Does that sound like any Rocky movies made later?)

Barbella, who changes his name to Rocky Graziano, fights for the championship against Tony Zale. In the subtitles, however, he fights “Tony Seals.” (Later, a guy named something like Quinberry is subtitled as “Queen Mary.”)

Back on Channel 2, Hector is showing more endurance than Jerry Lewis on Labor Day.

And, at the conclusion of each segment, CubaVision plays the same musical theme for Hector that was used for Larry King when Ted Turner’s TV superstation aired the Goodwill Games.

Turner gave the Cubans permission to use the music. Guess he figured that since it had previously been used during the Goodwill Games, nobody heard it.